10 Amazing Facts About the American Government's Psychic Program

1.

The American government used psychics in operations and experiments for over 20 years, with total funding of $20 million—eventually known as Project Stargate.

2.

Starting in the 1970s, psychics were researched and trained at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).

3.

Psychics produced detailed renderings of secret Soviet bases, the whereabouts of Red Brigade terrorism hostages in Italy, and the location of victims in the Israeli/Iran hostage crisis.

What color are my knickers?

4.

A media frenzy ensued when the Project Stargate was declassified in 1995 (Ted Koppel's Nightline, ABC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, etc.)

Hey, Joe.

5.

On ABC's Nightline, one of the operatives, Joe McMoneagle was put to the test by ABC anchor Ted Koppel. He proved the authenticity of remote viewing in front of millions.

6. In 1984 SRI psychic researchers organized successful 10,000-mile remote viewing experiments between Moscow and San Francisco with a famous Russian healer Djuna Davitashvili. Djuna successfully described where a colleague would be hiding in San Francisco, the experiment closely guarded by the USSR Academy of Sciences.

7.

The project began in 1974 when psychics accurately described a secret Soviet weapons laboratory in the far reaches of Siberia. The trial was so accurate that a formal Congressional investigation was launched to determine if there had been a breach in National Security. There hadn't been.

8.

Data from formal scientific Stanford Research Institute investigations over the course of 20 years were highly statistically significant—thousands of times greater than chance. The results were published in prestigious scientific journals—Nature, The Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and The Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences.

Remote peer review.

This movie sucked.

9.

In 2009 the Hollywood Film Men Who Stare at Goats—starringGeorge Clooney,Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey—satirized the Stargate Project. Unfortunately the movie’s farcical nature served only to make a joke out of the program's research legacy spanning two decades.

10.

In 1995 the Stargate Project was terminated, not because the psychic phenomenon didn’t exist—it was statistically verifiable. But the techniques were varied and results often vague. In the words of the final report “Though a statistically significant effect has been observed in the laboratory…we conclude that continued use of remote viewing in intelligence gathering operations is not warranted.” With drones who needs psychics?